Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, manufacturers have been concerned with reducing costs of production. Over time, manufactures have generally increased their use of machines and automation to reduce the cost of producing and distributing goods as new technologies have become available. However, as automated machines have assumed a greater role in manufacturing, their failures have had a correspondingly greater impact on production efficiency. Manufacturing costs related to industrial process failures in a modern factory can have a large effect on the overall cost of production. In particular, unplanned stoppages in production due to equipment failures, output blockages, and/or input starvation must be avoided to maintain efficiency.
In order to reduce the frequency and duration of unplanned stoppages, systems have been developed to detect stoppages and other events that reduce efficiency. Conventional process monitoring systems often connect to a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) that controls the equipment being monitored. The PLC receives input signals from various sensors and/or switches related to the process being controlled, and generates one or more control signals based these input signals and/or a state of the PLC. The process monitoring systems receive and analyze data from the PLC, and attempt to identify certain predefined events that are indicative of a stoppage.
There are many different types of PLCs in use, with each type potentially having a different input/output addressing scheme, memory organization, and/or instruction set. Thus, process monitoring systems must often be individually configured to operate with the specific PLC being monitored. Even within the same type of PLC, different models may operate differently enough to require custom programming. Further adding to the difficulty in developing process monitoring systems, some industrial machines, and/or the PLCs that control them, lack a machine interface from which the process monitoring system can receive data. As a result of these difficulties, the operation of much of the equipment controlling production lines goes unmonitored, is unable to determine when the industrial process has stopped, and cannot log stoppages when they occur.
Thus, improved systems, methods, and computer program products are needed that monitor industrial processes without the need for specialized programming or a connection to the equipment used in the process.